 | HAPPY BIRTHDAY SBLOGIT.COM | | | | | One year old today ... | Posted by Steffi Lewis on 12/12/2011 |
I was checking our visitor tracking database today and noticed that the first ever tracking record was added at 21:23pm on 12th December 2010 which means that sblogit.com is exactly one year old. Goodness me, what a difference a year makes ...
 happy birthday sblogit.com - one year old!
Every visitor to sblogit.com - or to one of our clients' blogs - gets tracked on every page or article they view. This isn't a creepy stalker thing, but it does allow me to find peak times and shows the phenomenal growth of our network over time. So ok, it was quite probably me visiting the site as I was still deep in development mode but it got me thinking about how different it is today compared to all those months ago.
It's interesting to note that I was right at the start of my NLP Training course with Edge NLP so I must have gone home all inspired from that first day to get on with an evening's programming. By the end of that week - and once I was a certified pratitioner - I remember talking to my friends Faz Colbhie and Pip Thomas (who also ran the course) and started to formulate the idea of a commercial Business Blogging platform.
You see the idea for sblogit.com came from a small problem I had with the original steffilewis.com, which this blog replaced. since 2007 I had been writing about biker scene stuff, photography trips and personal development ideas and then I wrote the original MyMailer system and hey presto, I started getting complaints from my readers. Those that were into motorcycles didn't like receiving stuff about personal development, those into my photography articles were only into the picture and as for the personal development people - well - they should have known better.
So I realised that the only way to please everyone was to separate all three blogs into different sites and I set myself a challenge. Design a system that works like the original steffilewis.com but lets me do it separately across different sites. I'd have to be able to skin them differently, each would need their own mailing list system and their own administration areas and use the same code-base even if they were perceived as completely different sites. And so the sblogit.com project was born ... but originally as a personal project! Thanks Faz and Pip ... look what your suggestions turned into!
I was working full time with a company throughout 2010 and at the beginning of this year I went part-time with them to spend my afternoons working on the platform to speed up development. I took a real hit on my salary for that one but knew I had to do it and still feel that was a great decision. I formed sBlogIt Limited on 2nd March 2011 and continued my development work whilst starting to attend business networking events.
It took a while to turn sblogit.com into a fully fledged commercial product. For the first six months of 2011 I was adding new features, debugging the system and setting up all the procedures I needed to ensure efficient delivery of new blogs and posts to clients. Initially I was only working with what I call my "pioneer" clients Pip Thomas, Edge NLP, and The Office Genie who were giving me great ideas and advice as well as understanding that their blogs may fall over at a moment's notice!
But we got there around June and I was pleased to say that our first commercial client, Pam Mannell came on board and they've all been happily blogging ever since. It wasn't until August 2011 that I felt confident with sblogit.com to leave my job and go full time in the company. I had quite a bit saved up and invested it all into the business to allow me to concentrate on growing it further.
I'm very pleased to say it's working! We're steadily increasing our client base and I love it when a brand new blog goes live. We're getting new trial clients every month and as we move towards another New Year I've set my targets for the next 12 months and then I'll write another article on sblogit.com's second birthday! I can't wait to see how much the company has grown, how many new clients we'll have with us by then and what new features I'll have built into the platform. It's going to be awesome!
Happy Birthday to my lovely sblogit.com. You'll never, ever be finished!
Love, light & logic ... 
STEFFI LEWIS
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